The TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

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March 20, 2011

Lines of Work

Of course there can be black faces in bucolic idylls.

A friend from New York calls and says that she has just read an essay about one.

She was not deliberately setting out to follow a distant row about whether a TV creator of rural fantasy should be suspended from work for not including ethnic minorities in his Midsomer Murders. See past post: and much else besides.

My friend had merely stumbled on our little English spat after reading the latest elegant edition of Lapham's Quarterly in which an English writer called Peter Stothard had written an essay about Roman slavery, beginning with a bucolic idyll starring a black woman slave. She just followed the links.

Did I have any comment about that?

OK, OK.

This is the link to the Lapham piece. Its opening concerns the Latin poem called Moretum, a minor bucolic idyll once thought to be by Virgil, in which a woman called Scybale helps a poor Italian farmer make pesto for his breakfast.

It is a delicate little poem, successful in a limited way as I tried to describe. Though nothing like as powerful as the least of Virgil's Eclogues, his genuine subversive versions of the idyll, (nor in any way intending to be) it is a useful example of a genre in which the known and the unknown, the familar and the unfamiliar, recognisable fact and created fantasy are kept in artful balance.

In the Lapham Quarterly essay, I likened Moretum to the country cottage decoration of a china cup. But, if I had been prescient, I could have used Midsomer Murders instead, a show which after this week's fuss will doubtless become a little different, a little less exclusively white.

For the sake of all who enjoy it, I hope MM will be more successful than ever, overcoming the perils of introducing artistic change for reasons of greater reality alone, remembering always that 'latet anguis in herba', as one might say.

Meanwhile, try a copy of Lapham's Quarterly - a wonderfully artful concept in itself, like nothing that we have here on this side of the Atlantic, and like most good things a vivid reflection of the character of its creator.

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A couple of years ago I went to my grandchildren's school fete, in a country village. There are a hundred or so pupils, and everyone turned out for the event. There were no non-white people there. I mention this to point out that putting non-white people in Midsomer Murders won't make it more realistic.
As long as it continues to provide escapist entertainment - pretty surroundings, honest policemen and ingenious story-lines - I'll watch it whatever the ethnicity of the characters. But I still won't believe in it.

[• Military commanders have insisted that Muammar Gaddafi is not a target in the action being taken against Libya. In interviews on Sunday, Liam Fox, the defence secretary, talked up the possibility of Gaddafi being targeted.

But today the UK chief of the defence staff, General Sir David Richards, said Gaddafi was "absolutely not" a target. "It is not allowed under the UN resolution and it is not something I want to discuss any further," he told the BBC.]

In both America and the UK, the military feels free to meddle in policy. Do we want Gaddafi's son setting off firecrackers in the august offices of The TLS?

The greatest geopolitical mistake of 2011 may be in the making, if Richards gets his way. Having stirred up the hornet's nest, it would be criminally stupid not to finish off Gaddafi and sons.

If the UK does not do it, get ready for harsh retribution that will make 9/11 look somewhat mild.

Perhaps there will be a Midsomer Murders scenario. I would not rely on it. I would rather have Sir Peter's opinion. Far seeing. Futuristic. A man with a mind.

[But it does underline the very complex matter of Derrida’s Judaism and the strong possibility that deconstruction itself is a mode of Oedipal revolt against the millennial Jewish commitment to textuality.] [...]

[...[Habermas and Derrida] met at a colloquium on Judaism in June 2000 and contributed to a book called Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Gravely ill, Derrida pronounced a eulogy at Habermas’s seventy-fifth birthday in Frankfurt in June 2004. Two days after Derrida’s death in October of that year, Habermas published his eloquent farewell, Ein letzter Grüss. He mourned the passing of a supreme “micrological reader” with deep Jewish roots. Adorno was to Gershom Scholem what Derrida was to Levinas. Bouretz asks whether this tribute did not come too late.]

However, not the worst commentary on Philosophy to appear in The TLS. That honor has to go to "Just cause," Brian Leiter on Nietzsche as the "first psychologist."

When performing a Leiter read, I start at the final paragraph and work to the front so as to expose the seams in his university undergraduate argumentation. The telling paragraph turns out to be:

"Nietzschean psychology, then, is an ironic kind of 'queen of the sciences' or first philosophy, one that does not, like its Kantian or Cartesian precursors, try to vindicate the epistemic bona fides of other forms of human inquiry, but tries rather to undermine them by explaining away philosophical doctrines--such as the Kantian account of the synthetic a priori or Cartesian certainty about the Cogito--as products of a hidden moral or at least evaluative psychological outlook, rather than the result of 'a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic' ('Beyond Good and Evil').

With 'try to vindicate,' with 'tries rather to undermine,' with 'by explaining away,' and with 'evaluative psychological outlook,' Leiter collapses his subsequent suggestions about the 'illusion of free ill.'

A useful project in epistemology would be to compare a text in "Cognition" (I recommend Ashcraft, 2010 Canadian Edition) with a routine undergraduate introduction to epistemology. For the suggestiveness of the former and the sterility of the latter. (My definition of a light-weight 'philosopher' is someone who deletes a comment he cannot understand).

Galen Strawson: This is my post to Sir Peter's blog on a couple of recent philosophy features in The TLS. Obviously, I do not like these articles at all.

They are far too mechanistic and unenlightening. Perhaps we have not noticed that the typical people speaking out on International Relations and Philosophy, for example, have lost their edge. There is far too little originality.

However, it is not specifically originality here that is the predominant issue. It is bad fundamentals. In my reading cycle this past year in psychology, linguistics, and philosophy, I found some dull texts on epistemology and semantics.

By far the best text that I read was "Cognition," by Mark Ashcraft (I read the 2010 Canadian Edition, but of course I would recommend the newest). Anyone who wants to comment on philosophy and psychology for The TLS should know Ashcraft inside out.

The most challenging text in English in terms of psychology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis is "The Turn of the Screw," even if only marginally over "The Wings of the Dove." (The subject of a chaotic essay by Zizek). I have included the illustration of the Norton "T.S." because it is marred by subtle textual problems.

It is to the enduring shame of psychoanalytic critics that they seized on an inept Poe story and never confronted "The Turn of the Screw," except in some fantastically distorted American analyses. If a philosopher claims to be able to write about the English language, she or he should be able to explain this tale.

There is no point in pontificating about the English language unless you have the COBUILD English Grammar on your desk. This should be the official grammar for every Philosophy department in the US and UK. Sensitization to grammar in "The Scarlet Letter," "T.S.," and "Heart of Darkness" is also indicated. I do not like shoddy work. (The new Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English is also excellent).

Whatever you may think of Leiter, he has been rather more active in opposing cuts to Philosophy Departments, and to other university programs in the UK than any of his British or Canadian counterparts.

Leiter's latent mind has some potential, but he would rather go superficial.

If I were Plato, my idea might be to cut to the very bone until you came up with some good red blood.

When the issue of artificial memory feats exploded in the rather mediocre air of the Sunday New York Times Magazine, I found the answers in "Memory, History, Forgetting."

The philosophy of natural memory is fascinating. Cognitive scientists who ignore it are foolish. However, professional philosophers effectively kept quiet about that artificial memory craze. They did not want their little tenured tea parties to be troubled by reality.

Leiter could study Mark Ashcraft's "Cognition" and the new third edition of the COBUILD English Grammar minutely and try to refute my suggestion that these books are essential for philosophy.

Perhaps in the philosophy departments there is a certain fatal lack of energy. (They have set up their camps on Lethe.)

When the Cambridge philosophical biography of Nietzsche emerged riddled with typos, I tried to impress upon philosophers that that was a bad idea. I may as well have watched midsummer murders.